Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Inception

So rather on a whim, Pyrona and I decided that a fun project to keep us occupied and active for a while would be to kayak around the entire shoreline of Lake Lanier, just north of Atlanta. In sections, because we haven't got the several weeks it'd take to do it straight. How far could it possibly be, right? Well, we checked and according to wikipedia, the shoreline extends for 692 miles. Goodness.

So! Feasibility first! We checked online and found that the Corps of Engineers kindly provides a GPX file of all of the public boat ramps on Lanier. I imported this into GoogleMaps, added the marinas and campsites, and started plotting route segments along the shore, from landing to landing. 50 segments and roughly 300 miles later, we've got the route planned out. Between skipping the many islands and tracing a circle slightly smaller than the actual shore, we've managed to trim off 392 miles already! Damn I'm good!

Now to start the hard part... I'll be very curious to see how long this takes us (I'm hoping to finish 1 calendar year after I start... though this seems mathematically unlikely) and how close those nice straight lines I drew on a map correspond to the actual route as recorded with the GPS.